A Bird Set Free
by Nwajesu Ekpenisi
Personal Reflection
A night inside a depressive crisis, told from the inside out — and the song through a neighbour's wall that interrupts it.
Where it scored
- Relevance to Theme
- Words are the intervention, not the subject.
- Originality
- Depression personified in the narrator's own voice.
- Emotional Impact
- The contact-list passage was cited by every judge.
The performance
What the piece does
A Bird Set Free spends a single night inside one person's depressive crisis and refuses to leave early. The illness arrives as a presence in the room — something that has no body of its own but prowls, coalesces with the shadows, and eventually gets inside the skull. The narrator tries the things people actually try at two in the morning: praying, running the shower, scrolling a contact list, searching the internet for a helpline. Most of them fail.
What turns the night is not a professional, a hospital, or an insight. It is Sia's Bird Set Free playing too loudly from the landlord's apartment next door — a lyric about not wanting to die, arriving through a wall, at the exact moment the narrator had run out of people to call.
Why it won
This year's theme was the power of words to promote mental health and prevent suicide. Most entries wrote about that power. This one dramatises it. The intervention in the story is literally a set of lyrics — words that reach someone with nowhere left to turn and give him language for a thing he could not say himself. That is the theme enacted rather than asserted, and it is why the panel placed it first.
The craft held up under re-reading. The depression is personified with real discipline: it has a voice, it changes register, and at its most dangerous it turns gentle — imploring, the narrator says, with the tenderness of a mother singing her toddler a lullaby. The piece understands that the most frightening thing an intrusive thought can do is sound reasonable, and sound like you. The recovery is written with the same honesty — not a cure, but a crack of light and one concrete reason to stay.
What readers should take from it
Two details here are worth the whole evening. The narrator looks for someone to call and finds a contact list of strangers. And the phone — mid-search for a Nigerian suicide helpline — runs out of battery. Help-seeking failed not because he refused to seek help, but because the scaffolding around him was thin. That is the preventable part.
How it impressed the judges
Entries are judged blind against four weighted criteria. Judges receive only the title and the text — never the author's identity.
Relevance to Theme — 40%
The strongest reading of the theme in the field. Words are not the subject of this piece, they are the mechanism: a song lyric is what stands between the narrator and an attempt. Judges noted that it also stages the failure of help-seeking — a helpline search cut short by a dying phone battery — without ever suggesting that help was pointless.
Originality — 30%
The personification of depression as an entity that borrows the narrator's own voice is handled with unusual control, and the braided structure — prose interrupted by unpunctuated italic lines and by a bracketed phone notification — gives the night a texture no other entry attempted.
Clarity and Structure — 20%
A clean single-night arc: invasion, bathroom, kitchen, release. The shift from surrendering to its grip to a head finally free of noise is earned beat by beat.
Emotional Impact — 10%
Unanimous. The passage on having no one to call drew comment from every judge independently.
How judging works · Maximum score 100 across Relevance to Theme, Originality, Clarity and Structure, Emotional Impact.
Excerpts
The passages that do the work.
Quoted from A Bird Set Free with the author's permission. The commentary beneath each passage is the Society's, not the author's.
I want to call someone. A friend, perhaps. One who can offer me some succour. I scroll through my contact list, searching and searching and then it hits me: I have no one.
Why this passageThe loneliest line in this year's competition, and the most useful. Crisis is rarely the moment someone decides they want to die — it is often the moment they discover there is no one to ring. I live through each day with a hole in the universe carved precisely in my own shape, watching the world spin wildly while I remained entirely out of sync with it.
Why this passageWhat depression does to belonging, in one image. Not sadness — dislocation. Google: • severe depression test, find your answers in 5 minutes. • suicide helplines in Nigeria. • Call a friend or family. … [Phone Battery about to shut down]
Why this passageHe did reach for help. What failed was the infrastructure of that help — a charged phone, a reachable person, a line that picks up. This is the part a community can actually fix. This thing in my head wants to slaughter me. I'm sure it can. I don't want it to, at least not now, and I don't know how to cope with it, and if I can cope, for how long will this menace continue?
Why this passageAmbivalence is the clinical heart of suicidality, and this sentence holds both sides of it at once — the wish to die and the wish to live, in the same breath. With it comes an assuring voice that tomorrow can be brighter than today, that the weight I carry will not always feel this crushing … Through the fog, the light assures me there's more ahead, and I'm still needed here.
Why this passageThe turn. Note what it is made of: not a solution, just the suggestion that the present feeling is temporary and that he is needed. That is often the whole of what a first conversation can offer. My head is free. Empty of noise. Empty of that vicious laughter. Sia is still singing about a bird set free.
Why this passageThe piece ends with the song still playing — the words outlasting the crisis they interrupted.
The excerpts above are a fraction of the piece. The complete entry is published here exactly as Nwajesu Ekpenisi submitted it.
Download PDF · 5 pagesCopyright remains with the author. Free to quote with attribution and to use in educational and advocacy settings.
Published 4 October 2026 · JMHS National Writing Competition 2026 · Using the Power of Words to Promote Mental Health and Prevent Suicide
